Recent archaeological digs at Barrow Island and the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast have revealed a number of artefacts which have helped build a unique record of coastal habitation by early humans.

Archaeologists need to study larger areas of land and link those studies to measurable environmental, societal and demographic changes to understand variations in prehistoric societies, according to Penn State anthropologists. ...

A multi-purpose bone tool dating from the Neanderthal era has been discovered by University of Montreal researchers, throwing into question our current understanding of the evolution of human behaviour. It ...

Archaeologists from the University of Basel discovered eggs of intestinal parasites in samples from the former Celtic settlement 'Basel-Gasfabrik,' and concluded that its population lived in poor sanitary ...

A small stone container found by archaeologists a half-century ago has now been recognized as further evidence of a Viking or Medieval Norse presence in Arctic Canada during the centuries around 1000 A.D.

A small human population which initially inhabited New Zealand swiftly caused the extinction of the country's flightless bird, the moa (Aves:Dinornithiformes), according to recent international research.

A 7,500-year-old underwater water well that has been partially excavated from a site on Israel's Mediterranean coast near Haifa will give important insights into the Neolithic society that once lived there.

Las Médulas in León is considered to be the largest opencast goldmine of the Roman Empire, but the search for this metal extended many kilometres further south-east to the Erica river valley. Thanks to ...

On an archaeology field trip in New Mexico as an undergraduate in 2006, Dana Bardolph noticed something that struck her as an odd gender imbalance: The professor leading the dig was a men, while the graduate ...

A new discovery of thousands of Stone Age tools has provided a major insight into human innovation 325,000 years ago and how early technological developments spread across the world, according to research ...

For more than 5,000 years, numerous civilizations have left their mark on upper Mesopotamia—from Assyrians and Akkadians to Babylonians and Romans. Their ancient, buried cities, palaces and temples packed ...

Archaeology

Archaeology, archeology, or archæology (from Greek ἀρχαιολογία, archaiologia – ἀρχαῖος, archaīos, "primal, ancient, old"; and -λογία, -logia) is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, features, biofacts, and landscapes. Because archaeology's aim is to understand humankind, it is a humanistic endeavor. Due to its analysis of human cultures, it is a subset of anthropology, which contains: physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. There is debate as to what archaeology's goals are. Some goals include the documentation and explanation of the origins and development of human cultures, understanding culture history, chronicling cultural evolution, and studying human behavior and ecology, for both prehistoric and historic societies[citation needed].

Archaeologists are also concerned with the study of methods used in the discipline, and the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings underlying the questions archaeologists ask of the past. The tasks of surveying areas in order to find new sites, excavating sites in order to recover cultural remains, classification, analysis, and preservation are all important phases of the archaeological process. Given the broad scope of the discipline, there is cross-disciplinary research in archaeology. It draws upon anthropology, history, art history, classics, ethnology, geography, geology, linguistics, physics, information sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleontology, paleozoology, paleoethnobotany, and paleobotany.